Abstract
I HAVE recently received from M. Pasteur a copy of his new work, “Sur la Maladie des vers à soie,” a notice of which, however brief and incomplete, will, I am persuaded, interest a large class of the readers of NATURE. The book is the record of a very remarkable piece of scientific work, which has been attended with very remarkable practical results. For fifteen years a plague had raged among the silkworms of France. They had sickened and died in multitudes, while those that succeeded in spinning their cocoons furnished only a fraction of the normal quantity of silk. In 1853 the silk culture of France produced a revenue of one hundred and thirty millions of francs. During the twenty previous years the revenue had doubled itself, and no doubt was entertained as to its future augmentation. “Unhappily, at the moment when the plantations were most flourishing, the prosperity was annihilated by a terrible scourge.” The weight of the cocoons produced in France in 1853 was twenty-six millions of kilogrammes; in 1865 it had fallen to four millions, the fall entailing in the single year last mentioned a loss of one hundred millions of francs.
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TYNDALL, J. Pasteur's Researches on the Diseases of Silkworms. Nature 2, 181–183 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/002181a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/002181a0